RO-MAN 2009 Richard Kelley

What is RO-MAN? The full name is “The International Symposium on Robot-Human Interactive Communication.” A human-robot interaction (HRI) conference. This was the 18 th (a surprisingly old HRI conference). ▫HRI as an organized discipline is younger than everyone in this room.

Where was RO-MAN?

What was I doing there? Talking about “Philosophical HRI” ▫More on what that means in a bit. Specifically, presenting a paper on legal issues in HRI: ▫Schaerer, E.; Kelley, R. and Nicolescu, M., “Robots as Animals: A Framework for Liability and Responsibility in Human-Robot Interactions,”

What does this have to do with HCI? HRI is (in many, but not all ways) a subset of HCI. ▫Since robots are “just” computers that can sense and move. Many of the ideas, methods, and results in HRI can be applied to HCI.

But wait, what is HRI…? Not just interfaces for teleoperating robots ▫But that’s a part of it… Three main themes ▫Technical HRI ▫Social HRI ▫Philosophical HRI

Technical HRI Making robots that interact with people. Heavy on the engineering, mathematics. Example project: ▫Design a vision- and laser-based system that can observe humans and predict their intentions. ▫This was my master’s thesis.

Social HRI Studies how people actually interact with robots Uses the methods of social science ▫User studies, ethnography, controlled experiments, observational studies, etc. Example of an interesting social HRI question ▫“Does a robot’s use of humor have any impact on humans’ perception of the robot?” ▫This is a current project.

Philosophical HRI The promise of autonomous robots represents great potential, but also requires that we rethink much of our current social organization Philosophical HRI is all about thinking (philosophically) about how individuals and society should interact with robots. Areas: social organization, economics, ethics.

And the stuff I talked about The problem ▫When a robot and a human get into an accident, who gets sued? The Solution ▫Robots as Animals ▫Joint works with E. Schaerer (Yale, 9 th Circuit Court of Appeals)

Robots as Animals Hybrid liability regime ▫Strict products liability for manufacturers ▫Negligence for owners  But victim negligence can mitigate owner liability Examples ▫Lawnmower ▫Car ▫Service robot

Other neat talks… Plenary Talks Other cool stuff from interesting people

Plenary Talk 1 Edgar Koener ▫Head of Honda Research Institute – Europe ▫Biocyberneticist “Learning visually guided autonomous interaction” Highlight: Robot that can learn to recognize 150 objects under arbitrary rotation and occlusion. Video available – search for Edgar Koener the brain-like vision. ▫It’s an hour though…

Plenary Talk 2 Henrik Lund ▫Professor, Technical University of Copenhagen “Motivating Human Interaction with Playful Modular Technology” Highlight: Playware blocks!

Plenary 3 I missed…  It was about robot temporal models. ▫This is going to be a huge area of Technical HRI though…

Other Cool Stuff Paro ▫First the video ▫Actually only kinda cool (a bit disruptive after a while)… Ubiquitous Display ▫Video Shopping Support Robots ▫Video Nao ▫Nao Tribute to Michael Jackson ▫At RO-MAN, Nao just did Thriller and Star Wars